Category: Book Reviews

Johnny Cash once stated that he had been everywhere. ^a Renee Altson has also been everywhere. She has been in the land of abuse, humiliation, shame, guilt, anger, and deep sorrow. This is a road very few people will ever travel. Stumbling toward faith is a profound and depressing read. It hurts and it stings; it is personal. To be sexually abused by your father, while he prays the Lord�s Prayer or sings the hymnody of the church is the most perturbing and despicable form of abuse. When anyone would lose their sanity over such atrocity, Renee fights; she fights for her sanity and for her humanity.

This book is the story of a woman who has tried all religious means to find refuge from her pain and, as a result, it deepened her agony and led her to even further disparity. The church, the house of God, the abode of comfort, the haven of rest, became the abusive ecclesiastical house in the life of Renee. She sought a place to belong and found that people wanted to control her instead of loving her. She sought love and found abuse; different forms of abuse. She experienced abuse unfathomable to most of our modern minds.

Renee�s story is the story of how fundamentalism can ruin the lives of people. It is the story of how man-made law can lead a person away from the very God they seek to worship. But Renee�s story is more than that; it is a powerful, though, implicit, critique of the evangelical world; a critique of those who have made God after their own image.

My first impression of this book was one of skepticism. Any book using different fonts, two-word sentences, and lower case style, strikes me as another emergent attempt to demoralize the catholic church; but this book caught me off guard. It truly spoke to me as a man; as a Christian; as a churchman. I love the church. It is my mother and I cherish its ideas and dogmas, but I am well aware of its sinful tendencies. After all, if it were not sinful Christ would have no business in sanctifying His bride.

I was struck by the simple poems and I was even struck by the verses she referenced. It was open and honest. The book runs like a series of journal entries. It appears to have no connection, but everything in it connects when one realizes it is the story of a woman who has been stripped of every form of human dignity and now finds herself trying to put the broken pieces of glass together to reconstitute her broken soul. Continue reading “A Review of Stumbling toward faith”

1. “I�ve been everywhere man!�  (back)

Johnny Cash once stated that he had been everywhere.¹ Renee Altson has also been everywhere. She has been in the land of abuse, humiliation, shame, guilt, anger, and deep sorrow. This is a road very few people will ever travel. Stumbling toward faith is a profound and depressing read. It hurts and it stings; it is personal. To be sexually abused by your father, while he prays the Lord’s Prayer or sings the hymnody of the church is the most perturbing and despicable form of abuse. When anyone would lose their sanity over such atrocity, Renee fights; she fights for her sanity and for her humanity.

This book is the story of a woman who has tried all religious means to find refuge from her pain and, as a result, it deepened her agony and led her to even further disparity. The church, the house of God, the abode of comfort, the haven of rest, became the abusive ecclesiastical house in the life of Renee. She sought a place to belong and found that people wanted to control her instead of loving her. She sought love and found abuse; different forms of abuse. She experienced abuse unfathomable to most of our modern minds.

Renee’s story is the story of how fundamentalism can ruin the lives of people. It is the story of how man-made law can lead a person away from the very God they seek to worship. But Renee’s story is more than that; it is a powerful, though, implicit, critique of the evangelical world; a critique of those who have made God after their own image.

My first impression of this book was one of skepticism. Any book using different fonts, two-word sentences, and lower case style, strikes me as another emergent attempt to demoralize the catholic church; but this book caught me off guard. It truly spoke to me as a man; as a Christian; as a churchman. I love the church. It is my mother and I cherish its ideas and dogmas, but I am well aware of its sinful tendencies. After all, if it were not sinful Christ would have no business in sanctifying His bride.

I was struck by the simple poems and I was even struck by the verses she referenced. It was open and honest. The book runs like a series of journal entries. It appears to have no connection, but everything in it connects when one realizes it is the story of a woman who has been stripped of every form of human dignity and now finds herself trying to put the broken pieces of glass together to reconstitute her broken soul.

Theological and Practical Observation

In page 61 Renee writes:

In my journey toward god, one of the greatest things I have learned is that there is much I do not know.

Renee Altson offers a uniquely post-modern perspective into our modern world. I am not one to dismiss the positive elements of modernism, but I am certain that this post-modern observation ^a bears a striking resemblance to the early church. In my Presbyterian tradition, a man named Gordon Clark asserted that only a rational Christianity makes sense of reality. For Clark, rationality was the climax of Christian existence. He even insisted that unless someone has the right propositions, he shall not enter the kingdom of God. When asked once about James’ statement that even the demons know there is One God, he stated: “The problem with the demons is that they did not know the other Christian propositions.” Van Til, on the other hand, opposed this form of thinking and spoke much about the idea of an “apparent contradiction.” For Van Til, mystery is a property of the Christian religion. We should cherish mysteries, for in mysteries we know that we cannot exhaust the mind of God.

Renee Altson, did not intend to make a theological proposition though this comment strikes at the heart of the Christian religion. She understands that to diminish the greatness of God into little slogans and catch-phrases are injurious to the faith and practice of the Christian faith.

Tragedies are a part of the Christian faith and for some, tragedies can draw them forever away from the Christian faith. Altson lived with the sense of being constantly suffocated by her father, her world, and her life. She could never reach forgiveness no matter how much she prayed or walked an isle. She was dismembered and God’s solution was to tear her apart a little more. As the title makes clear, this is the evil that God allowed. He could have stopped it; He could have sent a fire from heaven to consume her father, but He chose not to do so. Why? Only in His wise and infinite plan. My only prayer is that God would grant me a spirit of love and give me words that cannot be found in bumper stickers.

I recommend this book to any man seeking the pastorate and those who will seek to touch the lives of others with similar background. What Renee has done is awaken my (our) selfish eyes to the inexplicable needs of those around us.

Footnotes

1. From his great hit: “I’ve been everywhere man!” [↩ back]

1. Though Sinclair Ferguson has stated that there is no such thing as post-modernism  (back)

Movement Three begins with a host of illustrations that unveil this idea of aweness: to be in awe of something is to be struck by its wonder from surfing Trestles (072) to putting his arms around a man who now stares at his wife’s open casket (075). Much of life offers us moments of rare beauty that only God can provide. Rob calls these moments “Something Bigger” (074). They are greater than us and provide a moment where we can embrace life as if all the evil in this world is nothing comparing to the greatness of those few moments. As Bell notes:

Whatever those things are that make you feel fully alive and like the universe is ultimately a good place and you are not alone, I need a faith that doesn’t deny these moments but embraces them (074).

But lest we think that those moments occur merely in the joy of our lives, God also orchestrates His glory to be revealed in the “tragic and gut-wrenching moments when we cannot escape the simple fact that there is a way more going on around us than we realize” (075).

Bell proceeds with a fascinating discussion on epistemology (though he does not use that word). Man in his nature knows God. He experiences God’s majesty in nature and in his inward being. Man as Bell mentions, “ already intuitively believe certain things about the universe and the way the world works” (077). Romans 1 defines this human knowledge in terms of “knowing but repressing” (or suppressing). This is at the core of human denial: the betrayal of what he knows to be true. Our job as “gospelizers”(a term I use to replace “evangelists,” which is too filled with modern American jargon) is to make this unwarranted denial known (much to say on this topic since it covers a host of remarkable apologetic interactions; I will leave it to future posts).

Truth is to be found everywhere. At the very moment the unbeliever speaks truth he is using what Van Til termed “borrowed capital.” All truth whether from the mouth of a Cretan or Barbarian is God’s truth since God’s knowledge and wisdom cover the seas (this is illustrated in Acts 17 among other places). Indeed, as Bell points out “the whole world is full of the kavod (glory) of God” (078). This scheme is nowhere clearer than in Bell’s illustration on Turkish culture (080). In it he describes his trip to Turkey where he saw many unfinished homes that seem to have been abandoned. As one of Bell’s friends noticed however, the abandonment was merely temporary. The Muslim culture “does not allow financial debt, so people only build with cash” (080). People do not continually borrow money to accomplish anything they desire (typical of Western thought) rather they wait and build slowly until they have all of it paid. A debt-free life means freedom in unspeakable ways. This is truth found in the Muslim-led country of Turkey taken directly form the mouth of the apostle Paul who said, “ owe no man anything” (Rom. 13). Issues regarding exceptions to this case are not the heart of the matter here; rather the principle in Scriptures and Muslim culture is that debt ought to be an aversion to us all. All truth is God’s truth, though sometimes we simply don’t want to hear it.

Anyone who has recently entered into a Christian bookstore has come across a white-covered book with a simple and enticing title Velvet Elvis. At least if the younger generation is not enticed by the king’s lyrics, they will be captivated by the eccentricity of the book’s look and certainly the content. With 194 colorful pages with phrases that look like they are each a separate paragraph, Rob Bell articulates a new expression of the Christian faith. In much of the same way that others that preceded him have done (McLaren and others), Bell brings in each page a sense of newness that is certainly appealing to any reader who has experienced the betrayal of traditional church life.

Rob Bell states: “The Christian faith tradition is filled with change and growth and transformation” (p. 011). If the modern world is weary of a dead faith, then Rod Bell will likely succeed in this small treatise (not sure he would like that term). But is it true that Christianity has gone through change and growth and transformation? If anyone denies this process, it is likely that his mind is not in tune with this present world. Good change leads to growth and transformation; bad change leads to regression and sameness. Bell notes that “times change. God doesn’t, but times do.” Again this is certainly an accurate description of history. The God of all creation does not suffer change; He is the same forever and ever. His story, however, must change, must progress (think of the end of the Old Testament ceremonial laws) otherwise it is stagnant and the God of creation cannot demonstrate His greatness.

Rod Bell uses the example of Martin Luther and how he brought change in his generation. He “painted a new picture”, as Bell describes. Indeed Luther changed history and brought about a myriad of questions that still affect us 500 years later. Bell writes, “Luther was taking his place in a long line of people who never stopped rethinking and repainting faith.” This imagery sets up his premise that we must continue to repaint our faith in every generation so that God’s message is always speaking to all peoples at all times. This process he claims “hasn’t stopped. It can’t” (012). If that ever stops then it goes to the basement where Bell’s Velvet Elvis finds itself.

Where I Embrace and Where I Critique

So much of what Rob Bell offers is refreshing, challenging, and dangerous. Perhaps this is what makes it so intriguing. It is refreshing in that it reminds us in a new way of the Reformed motto: “Semper Reformanda,” always reforming. The church cannot stop and say we will stop learning; to do so implies it has reached its ultimate stage in history. Christ is still perfecting the church (Ephesians 5), enabling her to see her faults and blemishes. This means in many ways that the church needs to analyze their cherished beliefs not for the purpose of changing it but for the sake of reiterating its truths in different and more cogent ways. I have come across a host of critiques of Emergent Church leaders from the Reformed camp and many praises from the Reformed camp. If I agree with 99% of the criticism, I still find 1% of it beneficial or at least worthy of consideration. This little teaches me that truth is much more cosmic than our narrow perspectives.
Secondly, it is challenging because it forces us to ask new questions about God and the church. It is possible and probably true that any new question that may arise today may have already been asked sometime in God’s history, but if they have been forgotten it is worthy to bring them back to the forefront. In one sense it helps the pastor who has been preaching expository sermons for 40 years and has covered almost all the issues from Genesis to Revelation to consider a new set of questions he has never addressed. Further, it gives the church a broader understanding of our faith. Our faith exceeds a few doctrines, but it does not diminish them.

Finally, Velvet Elvis is dangerous. It appears that Bell finds little validity in Confessions and Creeds. If to explore the Trinity means having to redefine the Trinity or give it a new twist then I am highly skeptical. If the mere possibility of the Virgin Mary not actually being virgin is an idea that shouldn’t shatter our faith as Bell posits, then our Creeds can no longer claim authority in the Church catholic. To question the virgin birth is different than questioning Supra/Infralapsarianism. I could care less if I found out 10 years from now that I was wrong about the latter, but I would be deeply troubled, in fact skeptical about my faith if I discovered that the virgin birth was an early church hoax. There is a hierarchy of values just as there is a hierarchy of doctrinal values.

Our churches need new fresh applications to face their new fears and challenges. This is no time to begin shaking doctrinal stability; liberalism has already had its share. We need to emphasize loudly what needs to be emphasized and less loudly what is not so emphatic.

The Da Vinci Code is an artistic masterpiece according to some. Not only is it a nation-wide phenomenon as a novel, but unlike most novels it also assumes authenticity of its content. In the very first page we get a glimpse of its major premise: “All description of artwork, architecture, documents, and secret rituals in this novel are accurate.” This certainly intends to convey much more than a mere non-existing story, but a plot—indeed a plot to fool millions of naïve followers of the Christian faith.

Dan Brown is not only a masterful writer; he is also a remarkably talented apologist. Unfortunately, the apologetic involved in this novel is one that brings theological chills to those who wish to disagree with Mr. Brown. This is not a subtle attempt to undermine the Christian faith, but a striking and forceful attack on the Christian message. Indeed, Dan Brown knows the shallow thinking of church attendees and that they are open to just about any thing on the market that sounds reasonable. Perhaps this is the precise description of our American “Christian” culture. People are gullible to embrace anything and to be committed to nothing. Contemporary culture is replete with novels, but somehow this one seems to resonate a bit more with our culture (as the NYT testifies); but why? Because the fascination of the eager is also their demise. “Christian culture” if ever there is such a thing today in the US is fanatical about anything that sounds mystical and esoteric. Anything that will elevate their hopes for a new beginning or a new search will bring them to their philosophical knees. The culture at large, whether church –goers or blatant pagans have one thing in common, they are living for the moment. They desire something more than their well-built homes to satisfy them and something more than their Sunday Easter experiences with the local mega-church. Contemporary culture exists for phenomenon like The Da Vinci Code. It brings out what they have so longed for. It gives them a mystery to pursue, a story to follow in the hope that perhaps this one may work. And in case it doesn’t, well, there are many more to come. The contemporary culture lives seeking all, but grasping nothing; finding much, but feasting in nothing. As Jesus came into a culture prepared for and longing for a redeemer, so does Dan Brown’s fiction come into a culture prepared for and longing for a story; little do they know that Jesus is the story they have been wondering about from the day they were born.